MDES and Movie Watching: Examining Thought Patterns During Movie Watching Task

Multi dimensional experience sampling (MDES) occurs when questions are asked to participants while they are completing a certain task, and to assess and examine various facets and thought processes of participant’s experience while encountering that particular activity (Wallace et al., 2024). For instance, examining a participant's emotional state. This sampling method was applied to a movie watching study completed over the duration of May to August 2024. The study included 15 participants, who each observed a total of 15 film clips, in person in the lab located in Kingston, Ontario. The clips each ranged from one to three minutes, and comprised of various film genres. Participants would then complete an MDES questionnaire after observing each film clip. Once the data was obtained, a Principal Component Analysis (PCA) was completed. It was discovered that four components of thought were found including intrusive distraction, sensory engagement, episodic knowledge, and narrative comprehension of the clips. Episodic knowledge highlights the participant’s attention fixating on past events and their emotions and focuses less on current deliberate thoughts, and narrative comprehension concentrates on the participant’s problem-solving skills to understand the content occurring in the clips. Whereas, participant’s sensory engagement features their focus to sounds and images in the clips, and intrusive distraction aids in displaying that their focus is poor while viewing the clips, but their intrusive thoughts are high. Using the data it can be assumed that various thought processes can occur while an individual observes movies. It also aided in identifying any factors that could help or hinder participants' ability to focus on the movie clip task. The data can be beneficial in furthering our understanding of an individual's attentional abilities when viewing various genres and pieces of media. Works Cited Wallace, R. S., Mckeown, B., Goodall-Halliwell, I., Chitiz, L., Forest, P., Karapanagiotidis, T., Mulholland, B., Turnbull, A. G., Vanderwal, T., Hardikar, S., Alam, T. G., Bernhardt, B., Wang, H.-T., Strawson, W., Milham, M., Xu, T., Margulies, D., Poerio, G. L., Jefferies, E., … Smallwood, J. (2024). Mapping Patterns of Thought onto Brain Activity during Movie-Watching, 1–38. https://doi.org/10.1101/2024.01.31.578244